As more of us are working from home and self-isolating, we figured that we’d put together a little entertainment guide to help keep everyone’s minds occupied.
Community
If you’re looking for some company, may I suggest the “Escape Room ‘Secret Slack.'”
It’s filled with lovely escape room folk, and we wrote a guide to it a while back.
Cryptex Hunt
The Cryptex Hunt ended last week, but the puzzles will be available for all to enjoy (depending upon your definition of enjoyment) until the end of March 2020.
Tabletop Game
Call it catharsis, or call it macabre, but I know we aren’t alone in wanting to play some Pandemic. With all of this chaos, it’s kind of nice to feel like you can exercise some control.
Base Pandemic is a great time. If you haven’t played Pandemic Legacy Season 1 and Season 2, these games are an incredible way to spend a large amount of hours. Be sure to play them in order.
Tabletop Escape Rooms
There are tons of great tabletop escape games, and most of our favorites are currently available on our Amazon Store.
Discount Codes
Enigma Emporium (Carte Rouge, Wish You Were Here, and other games) is running a 30% off sale with the code “StaySafeStayCurious”.
The Conundrum Box (Christmas Seasonal Escape Room Box Review & others on our to play list) is having a 20% off sale with the code “SPRING”.
If you notice other discount codes are introduced or expired, please contact us and we’ll update this section.
Mobile Games
On mobile, there are tons of great escape room-y puzzle games:
YouEscape
YouEscape is an online escape game played through Google Hangouts. We’ve played and reviewed a few of the YouEscape games. They’re especially fun to play with people that you can’t see in real life… and depending upon your particular set of circumstances, that might be everyone.
Wizard’s Escape
The MIT Mystery Hunt had an incredible audio escape room puzzle. It’s hard relative to escape room puzzle difficulty, but so worth it. We have a whole post on it.
Podcasts
Speaking of audio and escape rooms, there are tons of episodes of Escape This Podcast & The Room Escape Divas to catch up on. A handful of these episodes feature us… if that’s a selling feature.
Escape This Podcast
In these episodes we try to solve an audio escape room scenario, complete with a set, characters, and puzzles:
If you’re into Escape This Podcast, down in the comments, Scott Weiss has offered to run one of his games inspired by the ETP format. We have a review of that as well.
Room Escape Divas
In these episodes we chat with the Room Escape Divas about the escape room industry:
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 106 (December 2019)
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 80 (December 2018)
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 61 (March 2018)
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 54 (December 2017)
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 30 (February 2017)
- Room Escape Divas: Episode 09 (June 2016)
Escape Rooms Gift Cards
There’s a good chance that your friendly neighborhood escape room business is hurting right now.
Many escape room companies have shifted to private bookings, so if you’re going with people that you would otherwise remain confined with at home, it’s certainly safer than going to a movie theater.
If you’re not looking to play now, it’s a kindness to pre-purchase your eventual games. A lot of escape room companies could really use the cash flow.
Holiday Buyer’s Guides
We have a few years’ worth of Holiday Buyer’s Guides. We put a year’s worth of research into each holiday buyer’s guide, something that we didn’t have time to do this week. You should check them out, and seriously consider purchasing a Hobbit Hole. It will complete you.
What’s On Our Quarantine Play List?
For the next few weeks we are shifting a lot more of our attention to reviewing play-at-home games and puzzles. We think that’s a healthier focus for the time being.
Come back tomorrow when we’ll share the list of things that we’ll be playing for the next few weeks. (Update: Check out Our Quarantine Tabletop Escape Room To Play List here.)
We will be welcoming your suggestions too!
Support Room Escape Artist’s Mission
There are lots of ways to support Room Escape Artist, like buying from Amazon, Etsy, or Art of Play after clicking into the links included in this post or backing us on Patreon.
The money that we make from these helps us to grow the site and continue to add more value to the community that we love so much.
Here’s a link to the BGG print n’ play landing page
https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Print_and_Play_Games?fbclid=IwAR1DkI69lg075zeUgq4-zXimuNTNYIfBTtVLRV_nZeY02JJ7xGgKSUQ4084#toc8
My audio escape rooms are available if anyone would like me to run one for you. Go to http://www.squonkland.net/escape.html to learn more and set up a time
Two recommendations not listed here that I think are worth mentioning:
1) P&A Magazine (http://pandamagazine.com/) is a bi-monthly puzzle magazine that comes out with practice puzzles, followed by a full-on puzzle hunt complete with a meta. These are super high quality and the most recent one was released a couple days ago, plus there are 83 back issues. Highly recommended.
2) ClueKeeper (https://www.cluekeeper.com/find/#anywhere) (and full disclosure: my company) has a bunch of “play anywhere” hunts that you can play from home, created by outstanding creators around the world, and includes play-at-home version of the past 3 DASH puzzle hunts, among other things. We’re also donating 20% of our proceeds to COVID relief efforts, and helping escape room owners build hunts on our platform as a new avenue for income.
Thanks, Rich! Great suggestions!
Hi!
Nice list 🙂 We have one for the spanish comunity if you want to take a look.
We will include your post in our article 🙂
That’s awesome. Please share it here?
Cool! Great guide – thanks a lot! I don’t even know what to do with myself, but there are so many alternatives to quest rooms – fantastic)